Upset by slow pace of repairs, more renters in Minnesota are forming tenant unions
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For two weeks this summer, Kyle Jones ran into a big problem getting to and from his Minneapolis apartment: waits of up to 15 minutes to catch an elevator in the 36-story building.
The building, called LPM Apartments, is near Loring Park and has about 350 units. Normally, three elevators serve the building — but two of them went down at the same time at the end of June. One of them was fixed after two weeks, easing the wait times — but Jones said the last one wasn’t up and running again until early August.
“Having just one elevator down seemingly triples the wait time. And, of course, having two out of three down, it was just absurd,” Jones said.
During long elevator rides, Jones started talking to his neighbors.
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“I noticed that there was a lot of angry people on the elevator, and so I thought I could seize this moment,” Jones said. “I printed out a bunch of flyers saying, ‘Hey, let’s unionize.’”
Almost a hundred people signed up, and several dozen showed up to the first meeting. They’ve now penned bylaws and elected representatives for their newly-formed tenant union.
A new law in Minnesota is making that process easier. The policy took effect in January, and it bars landlords from interfering in tenant organizing. They can’t take down flyers or stop tenants from holding meetings in the building. They also can’t retaliate against tenants who join a union by raising their rent or decreasing services.
Regan Reek is an organizer at HOME Line, a Minnesota tenant advocacy nonprofit.
“The interest in forming tenant unions has increased dramatically since we’ve passed this law and since the information is starting to go out to the public that this exists,” Reek said.
Tenants and organizers across the state are now testing out the protections granted under the new law.
Mold and leaking faucets
Valerie Mack is organizing her neighbors at 2119 Pillsbury Ave., a building in the Blaisdell Apartments complex in the Whittier neighborhood of Minneapolis.
She has incomplete work orders in her apartment. Two cabinets still have scorch marks from a kitchen fire years ago. Closet doors hang off their hinges. Her living room walls are bare — she took down photos and decorations months ago when she says management told her they’d send painters to cover some cracks, but no one ever came. She keeps her walls bare, just in case they come by unannounced.
Her neighbors have problems, too.
“People are complaining about mold, leaking faucets in the kitchen, knobs that don’t work, refrigerators with mold in it, stoves that are not operating,” Mack said.
Minneapolis inspectors have ranked her building on the city’s lowest property condition tier. Each property in the city is scored based on inspection results and complaints; inspectors bump properties to the third and lowest tier if they have documented maintenance problems.
The issues prompted Mack and her neighbors to organize. In August, a group of tenants knocked on the door of the building’s management office to deliver a notice that they’d unionized, and a list of demands, including finishing outstanding work orders. She hoped the collective pressure would spark some action.
But Mack said staff didn’t let them into the office. Days later, tenants got letters asking them to call or email to report problems. The note said building staff wouldn’t meet with renters for “safety reasons.”
Mack says she’s frustrated with managers.
“You have to care,” she said. “Since we gave our demands, nothing has been done.”
Blaisdell Apartments staff — and building manager Investment Property Group — did not respond to requests for comment on this story.
Pursuing legal action
Unlike in a typical labor union, there’s no set legal process for building owners to recognize or negotiate with a tenant union.
Residents can report problems to city inspectors. If the problem still isn’t fixed, they can take their landlords to court. A tenant union can provide power in numbers.
That strategy worked for the Brentwood Apartments in Minneapolis, which unionized last winter during heat outages. They petitioned as a union for emergency repairs, and a judge ordered the landlord to fix the problems.
Reek at HOME Line said she often recommends renters file for rent escrow — a legal process that lets a tenant pay their rent to the court instead of their landlord if there’s a problem that the landlord won’t fix. The court only pays the amount to the landlord once repairs are made. Tenants can also request money back on their rent.
“What can come from that can be really significant,” Reek said. “I’m talking about significant monetary returns to tenants. I’m talking about actually seeing repairs get done.”
She said she encourages tenants in a union to get as many people to file as possible, as a strategy to grab the landlord’s attention.
At LPM, Kyle Jones and several neighbors in the union filed escrow cases and asked for rent refunds due to the elevator issues. They didn’t win any damages. The last broken elevator was fixed shortly after they filed, and a judge ruled that building managers took appropriate steps to fix it.
But Jones wonders if the slew of court filings pushed managers to work quicker. He’s hopeful that a union will help expedite future repairs, too.
“Hopefully it gets their attention so that, whatever the problem is that they can’t get fixed, they really pay attention to it,” Jones said.
LPM owner Weidner Apartment Homes said in a statement that they recognized the inconvenience of this summer’s elevator outages, and said they won’t impede tenants’ protected right to organize.
Building owners and managers are still testing out how to navigate the new law, too. Cecil Smith, the president of the Minnesota Multi Housing Association, said he’s heard of residents turning to tenants unions, but he hasn’t seen many cases yet since the new law passed.
He had concerns with the new law — mainly, that it could spark adversarial relationships between tenants and landlords.
“We like to avoid that,” Smith said. “These people are our customers, and we are providing a really important service for them, and so we do like to see things being resolved amicably.”
So far, he said, he hasn’t seen that happen, in the limited examples of tenant unions he’s familiar with.
Smith said the association started educating its 2,200 members across the state about the new law when it passed. He’s watching to see if any tenants take their landlords to court over claims that they’ve attempted to interfere in organizing.
Valerie Mack at the Blaisdell Apartments said their union is considering court action over unaddressed repairs. She wants to improve her home — and avoid moving.
“I love where I live at, because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be fighting for it,” Mack said. “I refuse to let them off the hook like that.”
